Jungle Fever Read online

  Great. Five what?

  Unfortunately, the cabin of this plane was not pressurized, and the thin air whipping through the thousand leaks and broken seams precluded any chance to speak. At least I’m the one wearing the parachute.

  The presumptive pilot, or perhaps co-pilot, walked slowly to the controls on one wall and pulled a lever. The back of the plane opened, revealing a ramp that led down to a cloud bank. Dawn was starting to break over a jungle canopy and the tops of the trees were disarmingly close. The pilot held up four fingers.

  Five minutes, then. I knew that. Taylor glared at the man just to show he wasn’t intimidated. I know that once I’m off, you’re going to pressurize the plane and turn on the heaters, so you and your copilot can have a mini-rave, aren’t you? He got up and stretched. Then flexed, bent, turned, and stomped the built-up idleness until he was ready.

  Three.

  Taylor pulled the pistols and checked them. They were both unloaded, a safety measure until he was on the ground.

  Two.

  He stored the guns and strapped the bag to his chest. He double-checked the parachute straps and the release cable.

  One.

  He stood at the edge of the ramp and watched the trees roll under them. It wasn’t the first time he thought that jumping blind was incredibly stupid. He would trust everything to this person who was going to....

  GO!

  GO!

  GO!

  Taylor shook his head and ran as fast as he could. He’d stalled at the last second because he’d only just realized that the person violently gesturing at him was a woman. It had startled him a little—the last he’d heard, Dusty wouldn’t have a woman in his outfit. He shook his head, ran down the ramp, and flung himself into the air. It was as though the plane had flown out from under him. He was sailing through the humidity of the jungle, feeling each thermal as it rose against him.

  There was a clear spot below him, and he aimed for it as best he could. It wasn’t the first jump he’d ever made, though he’d never cared for it much. In the service his trainer called it the apex of stupidity, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. But every country claimed sovereignty over their airspace, and while they might not want every plane from all corners to come pay them a visit it would be impolite to refuse someone the right to fly over your country on their merry way to become someone else’s problem.

  So Taylor fell out of the plane on its way past Nigeria and well into Cameroon, which eliminated several hours of red tape and stale questions. He was also able to bypass the security systems airports had put into place precisely to prevent people like him from carrying guns and knives and other weapons into their countries.

  He rolled in the air, the occasional updraft adding a buoyancy that helped him navigate to the clearing. He tucked in and made himself as thin as he could to allow the air to slip past him, thus increasing his speed. When he judged that his descent was directly in line with the clearing he spread his arms and legs and arched his back, throwing out his chest to allow the wind resistance to slow him considerably.

  Only then did he pull the cord.

  The parachute exploded from the backpack, pulling him violently upward as the silk caught the wind and billowed into an arching sail. He was off-target again, so he pulled the strap on the left and bled a little of the air to arc that direction.

  It was a delicate operation. Pulling it too hard would mean that the parachute would collapse on that side, and if it didn’t get tangled or caught it might fill up again before he raced headlong into the floor of the jungle. He used the ropes with a great deal of caution.

  He landed roughly. The terrain wasn’t even, though the woods were clear. With the momentum of the fall he needed to run a few steps when he landed, to bleed off the speed of his landing. The ground was soft and loamy; his feet sank as soon as he touched, and he couldn’t free himself in time to take the energy from the landing.

  He heard the SNAP before he felt the pain. He was on his face in the dirt, being pulled along by the parachute that was now billowing in the breeze like a sail from an old-fashioned pirate ship and dragging him over the ground.

  He hit the release on the front of the harness and the chute snapped and pulled free, but his shoulder wasn’t clear. He cried out as the harness pulled his left arm from the socket, which was about par for the course. He hadn’t had a thing go right since she’d sent him that blasted email.

  Taylor lay in the jungle, hurt and alone. He stared at the sunrise sky turning an array of soft pastels, heralding the start to the day. From where he lay on his back he had a glorious view through the leafy canopy of the trees around him. The jungle slowly forgave him his violent intrusion and came to life around him, the call of bird and beast letting him know that he was less alone than he’d originally thought.

  With my luck I’ll get stomped by an elephant. The clearing circled a pool of water, a widening of a stream that had been dammed some time ago by fallen debris. He lay in the middle of what appeared to be an animal trail.

  Definitely time to move.

  He managed to free the kit from his chest and then began the grueling ordeal of getting his shirt off over the dislocated shoulder. By the time his torso was bare he was sweating, and his mouth was dry, painfully dry. The pool of water might as well have been a million miles away.

  Fighting to stay conscious he was able to unbuckle his belt and unzip his pants, but the boots he wore took a great deal of effort to get untied enough to pull off.

  He was near enough naked, though he lacked the energy to pull his pants completely off. He fell back and stared up at the bright sky of the clearing and willed himself to change. Nothing happened. He ground his teeth against the pain and tried again. Nothing.

  Taylor lay back and closed his eyes, breathing evenly and ignoring the searing pain that washed over him in waves from his shoulder and his leg. He concentrated on breathing. Just that.

  It took a few minutes. Only when he was calm did he feel the change happen.

  For as long as he’d lived, from puberty to now, for all the many times he’d transformed, it never got easier. Bones snapped and reformed, his breathing eased a bit and then stopped as his airways closed off and reopened in a different configuration. His eyes refused the light and then blinked, and he saw in a greater and brighter way than ever before.

  Hands palsied and caught as fingers retreated and his palms cracked and shattered. Bone became sharp claws that slid into the sheaths of giant paws.

  A moment later a mighty cat lay in the loam of the jungle floor, watching a billowing white cloth wrap around a tree, cords whipping frantically in the twisting wind. The tiger stood, stretched, and took stock. A bag lay at his feet. It was covered in the familiar scent, the other memory’s scent. There was death in that bag; the strong smell of what the other memory called “gun oil”.

  The cat sniffed the leather and cloth; the man-scent was thick on them all. This was a strange place. It smelled different from the last place where the mate, the other memory’s mate, once ran from hunters. They were hunters now. He sensed the danger though he didn’t understand it.

  The other memory echoed the image of the mate. Trying to draw his attention away from the danger. It was pointed to her now, striving to reach her. The cat snarled and shook itself. It hadn’t been out in a long time, and now it was in a new place without familiar scents and still missing the mate. The other memory clearly couldn’t be trusted. The cat refused to leave again but bounded and ran through the jungle, finding high ground, finding small foods to replenish the healing.

  After a brief time, because they are all too short, it relented and slunk back to the bag and the leather and cloth. The cat, still half angry and resentful, lay down where he’d awoken, watching the white cloth wrap around a tree and slowly deflate as the wind died and there was nothing left to catch.

  It was a blue sky and a soft bed that allowed the cat to change again. Too soon after waking, while there was still
so much to test and taste and hunt and explore. The cat cried out once before Taylor woke, naked on the spongy surface, healed and just a little bit sad.

  He dressed rapidly, thankful that he’d endured the pain of getting out of the shirt instead of tearing it to shreds as was usual.

  I may be spending a fortune on shirts but think of all the medical bills I’ve saved.

  He gathered the expended parachute and roughly shoved it all into the pack as best he could and dropped that into the trees for the monkeys to find. Then he gathered his bag and headed off in the general direction of a fairly good-sized town with a clinic in the exact center of it.

  Only, this town wasn’t here last month. It’s currently one of the fastest-growing cities in Africa. Populated almost entirely by refugees.

  Taylor didn’t allow himself to wander as he thought, refusing to head off in any direction but the one that would take him the fastest to his only goal.

  Angelica.

  He picked up his pace and began to run.

  Chapter 5

  Angelica had been in the administrative office of the refugee camp only once before. When she’d first arrived, she was ushered in for a conversation with the administrator himself. He welcomed her on board and gave her a quick tour of the 100-bed facility. She’d been surprised at the size of the clinic, it really being a small hospital, but apparently those in charge had foreseen that the needs of the community would grow to require such an extensive facility.

  That was two months ago. Since then the camp had turned into a city of over 1000 people and the administrator’s two assistants now had assistants of their own. From what she heard, the camp was expected to triple in size by the end of the year if the political situation didn’t change soon. She wondered where they would put them all.

  It was to a different part of the admin area where she was being currently escorted. With the influx of refugees came the influx of poverty, of cultural differences and, inevitably, violence and theft. It was possibly a statement on mankind in general that the fastest growth in the camp wasn’t the clinic or even the bed space to house everyone. The prison camp far outstripped either in requirements for space and staff. Thankfully she hadn’t been called on that rotation just yet.

  It was with trepidation that she was ushered now into the inner sanctum of what she recognized as the new office of the head of the camp. Their erstwhile leader, Robert Durand, had set himself up as a demi-god, with wide double doors opening into a carpeted office that seemed at odds with the rough camp outside.

  Mystified as to why she’d been called in, she half-expected some kind of reprimand for taking Charra out of the camp.

  The last thing she’d expected to see was the tall figure standing just to the left of the desk.

  “Taylor?” Angelica shrieked when she saw his lopsided smile. “Taylor!” she cried again, knowing that somehow, in some way, everything would be all right. He was there. He brought sanity and solidity to the chaos that surrounded her.

  She ran and embraced him, brushing past a few bemused soldiers. It wasn’t until she didn’t feel his strong arms around her that the real world crashed in on her relief. Her hands went immediately to his, wide startled eyes coming up sharp to his face. Taylor’s smile faded a little, and she saw for the first time the lines of strain around his mouth, the way his eyes didn’t quite meet hers.

  She whirled and snapped at the first soldier she saw. “Why is he tied?”

  “You know him, Doctor?” The question came from behind the desk, a lazy drawl that left her positively enraged.

  She looked up and stared, seeing Durand for the first time.

  He was too corpuscular for a soldier, though she understood him to have military ranking. A broad man in all aspects—wide face, shoulders that matched his massive girth. Young as he was he was pushing for a heart attack, especially the way his face was flushed as he sat lazily in his chair. She hadn’t liked him the first time she’d met him, when he’d talked down to her as though a woman weren’t capable of intelligent conversation; she had even less good will toward him now.

  Flushing is an increased amount of saturated hemoglobin, an increase in the diameter or actual number of skin capillaries. The vasodilation of flushing may be caused by a direct action of a circulatory vasodilator substance—for example, histamine—or it may be caused by changes in the neurologic control of the cutaneous vasculature in the affected areas.

  “He’s my fiancé!” It was a lie, but it was fairly close to the truth. Angelica felt a small tinge of surprise at how easily the words came out of her mouth. It felt natural. Good.

  But seeing Taylor with his hands behind his back, big plastic zip ties binding his wrists together like that, was too much to bear. In a week of having to witness horrendous things, this truly was the last straw. She kept a hand on his arm, but already she was looking around the room for something she could grab to cut the ties that bit so painfully into his skin.

  “Doctor, we have some concerns.” Durand was in charge of the security for the camp and was the local equivalent of a lieutenant. It wasn’t a particularly plum assignment, the sort of posting given to someone who had to prove himself or to someone who had peaked and given up years ago. In this case the young man was apparently sent here to burn off some of the arrogance he’d come with. So far it had only served to reinforce his view of himself. She wondered how much he knew of what happened at the clinic. Whether he was in on whatever Dr. Manchester was up to. How well did he really know what was going on in the camp?

  “Your... fiancé,” he said, as though he didn’t believe a word of it, “suddenly showed up in the middle of the jungle without a car or plane or any other type of transportation. Some might find this to be very questionable. Other than saying your name, he has been... uncooperative.”

  Angelica glared at the man, who finally sighed and signaled for his men to cut Taylor free. Taylor stretched, though the guards around him tensed and eyed him warily. They had good reason to. Taylor was tall, built as though someone had decided to create a fitting tribute to his Viking ancestors. He towered over the others, his shoulders even with the tops of their heads.

  “Thank you,” he said, his tone painstakingly polite to the young man behind the desk. He wrapped one arm around Angelica and she hugged him tightly again, not caring who saw or what the well-armed men thought. It was the second time she’d been around soldiers of this type in as many days, and she wasn’t liking the trend.

  As though sensing her unease Taylor pulled her a little closer, though she felt the slight tremble through his arm that spoke of careful control, of a need to not become something different in front of them. “I didn’t mean to sound uncooperative,” he said, his gaze never once leaving Durand’s face. “I just found it difficult to talk with my arms bound behind me and a gun pointed at my head.”

  “And now that you’re able to talk?” the lieutenant prompted, a little nonplussed it seemed by the turn that the conversation was taking. He was losing control of the situation and wasn’t entirely sure how it had come about.

  When Taylor grinned, there was a feral quality to it. Something dangerous that made the men stand back a little, giving him space. “My name’s Taylor Mann. You have my passport and my ID. I’m a reporter on assignment to Zambia to cover the refugee crises. As administrator of this facility, perhaps you can answer a few...”

  “No comment,” the lieutenant interrupted and waved him away, his attention coming to rest on Angelica, who by this point was starting to find the whole situation strangely humorous. “Fine, Doctor. He’s your responsibility. Whatever he does, you’re responsible. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do believe lunch is being served.” With that he got up and left, taking his men with him.

  Had their exit not been so carefully choreographed, it would have looked like retreat.

  Angelica had no doubt that Taylor had ended that entire encounter having gained the upper hand. She glanced at him now, smiling, relieved that things ha
dn’t escalated in another direction entirely.

  Taylor responded by wrapping his arms around her, finally, and burying his face in her hair. His large hands pressed against her, enfolded her. Angelica grabbed his shirt and hid her face in his chest. Now that the entire encounter was over, she suddenly felt like crying.

  “I’m here,” he murmured against her hair. “I’m here. We’re together.”

  “You’re here,” she agreed softly, reaching up to touch his face.

  Together. That was the key word, wasn’t it? Their partnership had been forged under fire. As a team they could do anything.

  She tilted her head back that she might look at him, really look at him. Yes. Conspiracies or not, all would be well. Right?

  Tayler inhaled and closed his eyes as he stepped back slightly.

  “I missed you.” Angelica stood a moment and breathed in the scent of him. It was a smell uniquely and truly him. A masculine, heady scent with a hint of something else, something sharper, more... wild. “How did you get here so fast?”

  “I called in a favor,” Taylor shrugged. “Then I jumped.”

  “Wait, what do you mean ‘jumped’?”

  “You know...” Taylor whispered, looking around as though for someone who could be listening. “Airplane, parachute...”

  Angelica felt her eyes grow wide. “You jumped...” She exhaled and started over, quieter. “You jumped from a plane? To get here? Why?”

  “Because someone didn’t want me to come,” he said simply, though she could tell from his tone there was a lot more to it than that. “Someone very important.”

  They needed to talk about this elsewhere, someplace more secure. Later. For now, she could only sigh and shake her head. Let it go, though she didn’t want to, and her curiosity was going to leave her tortured until she had the whole story. “At least you’re here,” she said finally, and couldn’t help but smile because, despite all the worry of the past two days, the truth was she’d missed him. Really missed him. Her words felt inadequate, but she said them anyway. “I’m so glad to see you.”